Looking for 'vanished world' in Albany

Old photos being used to reconstruct lost Empire Plaza neighborhood

Updated 6:59 am, Thursday, May 2, 2013

Photo: Cindy Schultz

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Mary Paley of Albany holds an historic photograph on the corner of Madison Avenue and Grand Street on Wednesday, May 1, 2013, in Albany, N.Y. The photo is of Nelson Rockefeller at the time when an Italian neighborhood was demolished to make way for the Empire State Plaza. Paley is making a documentary entitled "The Neighborhood That Disappeared." (Cindy Schultz / Times Union)

Mary Paley of Albany holds an historic photograph on the corner of Madison Avenue and Grand Street on Wednesday, May 1, 2013, in Albany, N.Y. The photo is of Nelson Rockefeller at the time when an Italian

Grand Street Community Arts, home of the former St. Anthony's Church, on Wednesday, May 1, 2013, in Albany, N.Y. Mary Paley is making a documentary entitled "The Neighborhood That Disappeared." (Cindy Schultz / Times Union)

Grand Street Community Arts, home of the former St. Anthony's Church, on Wednesday, May 1, 2013, in Albany, N.Y. Mary Paley is making a documentary entitled "The Neighborhood That Disappeared." (Cindy Schultz /

Children walk past Grand Street Community Arts, home of the former St. Anthony's Church, on Wednesday, May 1, 2013, in Albany, N.Y. Mary Paley is making a documentary entitled "The Neighborhood That Disappeared." (Cindy Schultz / Times Union)

Madison Avenue on Wednesday, May 1, 2013, in Albany, N.Y. Mary Paley is making a documentary entitled "The Neighborhood That Disappeared." (Cindy Schultz / Times Union)

Madison Avenue on Wednesday, May 1, 2013, in Albany, N.Y. Mary Paley is making a documentary entitled "The Neighborhood That Disappeared." (Cindy Schultz / Times Union)

Photo: Cindy Schultz

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Former Knickerbocker News photographer Bob Paley, who documented the destruction of a neighborhood to make way for the Empire State Plaza.

Former Knickerbocker News photographer Bob Paley, who documented the destruction of a neighborhood to make way for the Empire State Plaza.

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Former Knickerbocker News photographer Bob Paley, who documented the destruction of a neighborhood to make way for the Empire State Plaza.

Former Knickerbocker News photographer Bob Paley, who documented the destruction of a neighborhood to make way for the Empire State Plaza.

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Looking for 'vanished world' in Albany

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Albany

Nearly 40 years after her father's death, Mary Paley is reconstructing the story he recorded of a neighborhood destroyed by the egos of powerful men — one haunting black-and-white photograph at a time.

"I think he found the project terrifying because the architecture is not at human scale. It towers over the city," Paley said of her father, Bob, a former Knickerbocker News photographer who left behind a trove of photos detailing the rise of Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza and the nearly 100 acres of crowded city blocks bulldozed to build it. "I think as a collection they infer a story. And it's not a happy story."

Bob Paley died in 1974 at 49, four years before construction of the Plaza was finally completed.

But the images he left behind are a central character in a documentary, "The Neighborhood That Disappeared," which his daughter and two partners are dedicating to the thousands — as many as 9,500 by some estimates — uprooted when their homes and businesses were taken to build the mammoth government complex that defines Albany's skyline.

To this day, the construction of the Plaza — and the shocking speed with which an entire neighborhood was condemned through eminent domain — remains one of the most momentous and traumatic periods in the city's 400-year history.

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Derided by some as the city's "Garlic Core" for its concentration of Italian immigrants and compared by others to Manhattan's Lower East Side, the area bounded roughly by Lincoln Park and State, Eagle and Swan streets was a teeming melting pot of Jews, Germans, Irish, Armenians and French-Canadians.

"It's that vanished world that I'm trying to evoke," Paley, a retired city middle school English teacher, said. "Their voices haven't been heard."

So far, Paley and co-director John Romeo have amassed more than 40 hours of film and are raising money on the crowd-funding website kickstarter.com to finish it over the coming year. Paley, Romeo and composer/sound designer Bernie Mulleda estimate the project will cost $35,000 and are hoping to raise $5,000 online by May 24.

The film will focus largely on the fate of the city's once thriving Little Italy, whose occupants were dispersed around the Albany area. Though St. Anthony's Church on Grand Street — the symbolic hub of the Italian community — was not among the four churches demolished to make way for the $2 billion marble Goliath, the church closed in 1973 and the parishioners scattered.

Rockefeller's inspiration for the project is said to have stemmed from his mortification at the condition of the capital city's slums while hosting Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands on a trip to the United States.

Albany County's vaunted Democratic machine, periodically at war with the Republican governor, at first fiercely opposed Rockefeller's bold dream but later backed it after Democratic leaders — including Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd — devised a way for the county to profit from a mega-financing deal that also allowed Rockefeller to avoid a public referendum on his pricey vision.

Among those displaced by the Plaza and a later South End urban renewal project targeting an adjacent neighborhood were George Virgilio, the proprietor of a tailor shop and laundry who lived at 102 Madison Ave. and saw his home condemned even though it was never demolished.

Virgilio's nephew, Patrick Bulgaro, former budget director for Gov. Mario Cuomo who wrote his master's thesis at Siena College on Italian immigration to Albany, has served a historical consultant to the film.

Until the day he died, Virgilio believed his home was largely stolen from him, Bulgaro recalled. And for those who remember the thriving neighborhood that vanished, the Plaza is far from the bold statement of progress that boosters over the years have made it out to be.

"We look at that, and we see a cold, sterile environment that's really a monument to arrogance," said Bulgaro, who grew up on nearby Philip Street. "I think it was arrogant for a political leader to displace so many people, to uproot their lives, to change their culture in the space of a few years, to destroy all the relationships that had been built up over half a century."

Albany's "big-city, small-city dilemma" is also part of the saga, Paley said.

"It's a very complex story," city historian Tony Opalka, who also contributed to the film, noted. "The overall narrative is, 'Oh, it was a horrible slum and it had to be removed anyway.' That was a very broad brush, and it doesn't talk about the individuals that were affected. That was people's roots."